Tuesday, March 29, 2005

So Safe I Could Scream

Tuesday morning, day two of my “five days at the office” posts.  Once again, I’ll conclude with a random business name from Richmond or Albany, CA.  Just because I cherish structure.

I usually sit at an internal cube, sheltered from direct exposure to the outside world.  But last Tuesday, I realized that, with my supervisor and colleague both away, I ought as well undertake my routine desk work at their desks, with their associated expansive views west down Howard Street and north over across the cityscape.  It was 11:45 by the time I got fully situated.  At noon I happened to look up into a murky day of blue rain and heavy clouds, spring showers and squalls lashing the window at the whim of the wind....

Then I heard the sirens.  Oh yes, Tuesday, noon.  Sirens.  Every week.  But this time it was different - I really noticed them.  My mind flashed back to those ads I’ve been seeing lately on the busses: ears to the left and right, listening to a black background with a clock in the center.  “The Tuesday Noon Siren.  (Move over, foghorns.  Safety has a new sound.)” They’ve always blown civil defense sirens at noon on Tuesdays, as long as I can remember - a weekly warning warmup that almost seemed comforting in its regularity and soft keening call.  It was like the bellow of a she-bear to her cubs, an invitation home for cocoa and shelter - be it a defensible treestump, or radiation pills.  But the ads had alerted me - there was a new siren in town.  And I was right next to the windows, not squirreled away in the rabbitwarren.  And that mutha was heavy. 

The siren struck as I was already looking out down Howard Street, the brake lights and headlights, business marquees and billboards all peering dimly back at me through the rain.  The sound was intense, immense - a single rising wail that seemed to come from deep below the ground and rapidly, inexorably, rose in the air all around my building, all around me, till it reached an anguished alto beyond which both my heart and ears would start to bleed - and then, just as rapidly, ebbed away, dropping in volume and pitch till it extinguished itself in the sodden pavement, disappearing entirely within just a few seconds of its beginning.

One call of the siren, and it was over.  The city seemed not even to have noticed it; all went on as it usually did.  But, having heard it myself, loudly and clearly, I felt as if I’d lost something with spiritual value, in exchange for a useful but soulless tool.  The old foghorn of attentiveness had been replaced with the klaxxon of outraged anxiety.  It certainly fulfilled its primary goal of heightened awareness, and did so with chilling efficiency - but had replaced a warm beacon of safety with a yawning auditory emptiness, a sound that evoked an existential crisis.  I couldn’t tell, as I looked out over the apathetic city, if the siren was warning me of something that was coming, or something that was already here.

Random business name from Richmond or Albany, CA: Naral, Div.